Driving down through Gunnison, Colorado, then through a small valley with creek and red rock walls, over Buffalo Pass and eventually into the wide St Louis Valley—a rift valley, like the ones we have flown over recently in Africa. We stop at a roadside hot springs and sit in the almost boiling water, and look out at the desert with mountains behind. We pass through towns like Moffat and Crestone; drive by some piles of clear white sand at the foothills to the mountains. And all the while I can feel the opening-up-ness of the valley, the water, its springs. Amidst the industrial junk and flatness, there is a life—a watery life—ripped open and springing up still. We pass on to the Rio Grade Gorge, with its bridge, beyond the Taos Earthships. Down down into the valley we look, and see that water—more water—flowing out, and down, and on. Mexico on.
Category Archives: Shoreline Poetics
Everglades
Apparently an everglade is a slow-moving river—very slow, but always moving. Apparently the Florida everglades start up in Orlando and slowly, very slowly, make their way down here towards Miami, splitting off on the one side towards the Atlantic coast, and the other side towards the gulf of Mexico. We take a boat ride. The guide says the levels used to be lower, before they dammed and sculpted the flowing water; says that dear and boar used to walk these shores. He takes the big-fanned boat through watery canals, and then right over the top of the sword-like grasses. He points out an island—something he won’t be going over—and says that first-nation people once used to live on islands such as these. He asks how we think they dealt with mosquitos; I can only think of fire. He also mentions mud. We see turtles, and fish, and birds, and alligators waiting in ‘holes’. These everglades used to be seen as a kind of dead land; now they’re seen as an ecological asset. I have a picture of them as a kind of lungs for the breathing of this part of the east coast. All that water slowly moving; all that water flowing out.
Parakeets at Sunset
South Beach Miami, amongst the long sandy island now built-up, with art deco hotels and other layers. We’re sitting on a rooftop amongst the humidity and cooling wind, amongst the cumulus clouds and passing rain, amongst the sunset flaming golden over the city to the east. And even here, amongst these differences and similarities to all things West Australia, there are the parakeets shooting past, sunset screeching.
Cambridge Cold Front
Boston, Massachusetts: stratus, maybe cumulo-stratus when I first walk outside, looking up. It’s humid, warm, high 20s, little to no wind on the so-called Charles River. I walk along the water’s edge, all brown and slowly going, towards the Longfellow Bridge. I make my way gradually, pondering the slow pondering of rivers. Then, eventually, reaching a kind of narrowing of the path by a road’s edge, I turn back and see a large, black-grey cumulonimbus rolling over Cambridge from the north west. The wind whips in first, the air is cooler, dust blows up, trees begin to lose leaves and small branches. The rain is light at first, then larger drops. People begin to scurry; then they start running. I head back to a café near the hotel, rain beginning to increase; I go in, order at the counter, then turn to see torrential rain outside; lightening and thunder; people scurrying, running. Someone walks undeterred, drenched, without shoes. I sit by the window and watch, eating, waiting it out for about half an hour; lighter drops eventually. I begin to walk back. Some people are very wet. A small finch—or more likely what they call a house sparrow—appears under a curbside tree, hopping on his two little stick legs.
River Charles
Today, still a little sick, I take to the street and sun and walk out of the MIT area up towards Harvard. I try to find a centre for environmental humanities. Someone there tells me he just met a bunch of West Australians last week—a foundation I won’t mention. He redirects me to an empty entrance of a building; I take a brochure and walk down to the river Charles, where some 22 years earlier—half a life ago—I stood on a pedestrian bridge one Saturday night in September and watched a bustling 2002 world go passing, walking, sailing by; a kind of mirroring of life—the middle of which would be 33. And I look down on the river again now, reflecting; the bridge and river empty; the sun is warm, sharper than I can handle with illness, and higher than it was 22 years ago. I begin to head back, but not before cutting through some bushes down to the water’s edge. I throw in a handful of dirt and (re)introduce myself. I remember. It remembers. We remember.
Turtle Island
We walk the island at Hudson Crossing, upstate New York, with old friends and their family. At one point I go down to the river, causing me to fall back a bit from the group. And suddenly I’m struck by the love of the first people of this place, and the way they held something down here—a kind of double. I go on as I slowly catch everyone up, and come across, at the river’s edge, a turtle statue. Then on the bridge we are together again, and I look down and see, in the river below, an actual turtle…on the edge of this island—on this Turtle Island.
Moths, Butterflies, Dragonflies
Early June near Cold Springs on the banks of Mohicantuck / Hudson River, a warm day, no breeze, the water moving slowly glass. We step through the trails and grass and green of this New York, and everywhere we place our feet there springs more butterflies, moths and dragonflies.
The Winter Bark
I walk back past the large gums by the lake noting their shiny, smooth, grey-green bark—the strands of old bark shed in summer now lying wet and crumpled at their feet. No longer do they wait, with kindling-bark scattered for the fire that will not come. Now they start building up again, slowly, smoothly at first, the layers of next summer’s kindling, which will eventually dry and fall and harden with the comeback of the sun.
The Cold Front
The first real cold front of the year has arrived, bringing lightening, thunder, wind and rain. Up to this the rest has been mere tropical lows dipping down, I would say. But the lake today looks almost full, or full to where the grass has advanced over the long summer at least. And the scouters of the last few weeks have brought back mates. From four yet Pacific black ducks yesterday we now have three or four dozen. The janjarak black winged stilts have remained in numbers—half to one dozen. Six nymiarak shelducks chase one another—one stands near five swans that sit among the grass of the western bank, pulling it up. Kwirlam the swaphen is still here of course, now outnumbered. Kanamit the welcome swallow swells up and down in a moving cloud in the south east corner. And about a dozen marangana wood ducks keep under the fig trees in their usual spot to the south. It’s almost as if they’re all adopting their positonings. Anyone seing the lake today and at its equivalent level at the end of last year might say: ”This place does not change! Even the very birds are the same.”
I look around and the black and shelducks are actually swimming; and actually gliding down and landing on the water—although I do watch two black ducks come into land where a dozen or so stand amongst the puddles between the red-coloured ground cover, reaching out their feet to the water and, abruptly, suddenly, pulling up short. The swans on the other side, mostly in the grass, still stand. The wood ducks do a bit of both. And the ibis seem to have moved even further north, preferring the dryer bits. No more seagulls today, they seem to be a kind of pioneer, a first responder, though easily despondent; something in them knowing this is not typically their place, or mostly only with first rains.
While something in all these other birds seems to know this is their place, waiting patiently for first rains, sending testers, and then come the numbers. Something in them seems to know. A kind of patterning. But not a kind of thinking. There’s no doubt, or judging. They are following a kind of topography. A kind of languaging. One spoken here for eons. They do as they must—as they are directed by a patterning of the seasons without room for any reasoning or freedom. Not like us. We have to chose something—to live in accordance with a greater lawfullness…or not. One is naturally nature. In the other—something must be created.
The Seagulls Desertion
There’s been some more rain overnight and the seagulls and ibis and Pacific black ducks are back at the lake. The water has spread almost all the way to the jetty on the southern side, and has started to link up with the other puddles slightly north by the rushes and reeds. There must be about 30 gulls on the water’s eastern edge. I don’t see the ibis at first, but they’re even further east amongst the red ground-covering plant, dipping their long protrusions of beaks down into the dryer (but now-slightly-less-so) parts of the lake, claiming something there brought by rain to new life…and death. There are half a dozen black-winged stilts, two Pacific black ducks paddling in the centre, sending little ripples out from their efforts—plus another two I see a bit later in the northern part, sitting down upon the water, hoping to float, but then having to stand again. I wonder where the shelducks have gone—none left this morning, but then I spy a group of six larger ducks circling above the lake, before flying to the east; they have white underwings, but from this angle I can’t tell if they’re shelducks or wood ducks or what—amazing what a change of perspective will do; I watch them fly by, and turn back to the lake, only to see two shelducks come in from the north—were they two that peeled off?—to land on a shallow stretch, by the jetty, only recently wet.
But before the ducks I watch all the seagulls, previously quiet, start up a gradually growing racuous, first one, then another, growing louder, then many, then in a small group they suddenly, noisily, lift off, with most of the others joining them, except three, then two, as the rest fly higher in a noisy white cloud, disappearing off to the south west—ocean or river; a third then reappears and lands near one of the others, while the more solitary gull stands by the water’s edge to the north. And if I hadn’t seen their great departure and had only arrived now I would have thought there had only been but three gulls at the lake this morning (plus kwirlam the purple swapmhens frolicking to the north, and kanamit the welcome swallow flying low overhead, and dilibrit the magpie lark and djidi djidi the wagtail in the mix. the sound of the grey butcherbird, kookaburras to the south and east dipping down for food, the odd wardong on the water’s edge, half a dozen dotterels, a little buff banded rail suprising me not far from my feet, and a faroff bird on dead tree limb in the northern part of the lake—a kite maybe—plus all the rest.) For what’s revealed in a moment must be joined to other moments, as best we can, in imagination—forward and backwards—resting as we must on the data of these momentary bits, and our own inner activation. But still, nice to be reminded of the bits we must miss.
John Stubley 